Let’s Explore v4 – Weeding Lines

Today, let’s talk about weeding and more specifically about weeding lines.

Tutorial written in Silhouette Studio v4.3.372
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What is weeding?

When someone references weeding with Silhouette, they are talking about taking away the excess material from around the design that has been cut, no matter what material it is. Just like you would do in a garden when you “weed”, you are taking away the plants you do not want.

You will weed or remove the white areas around the design in the photo above that the arrows point to. This way you are left with the design only.
Unless you are creating a stencil and then you will weed away the actual design to be left with the stencil portion.

What are weeding lines?

Weeding lines refer to anything that is added to the design to “help” in the weeding process. This could be drawing lines or shapes around smaller sections of the design in order to help when you remove the material.

This is one thing that I always forget to add into my large designs before I cut and unload the cutting mat.
But, it’s not just for large designs, it can also be a great technique to be used for smaller, delicate designs as well like a script font.

How to add weeding lines?

There are 2 ways you can add weeding lines to a design.

Option 1 – Use the Weed Settings Panel found on the right side, in Business Edition. This will add weeding lines automatically to the design in the areas that the software sees as “clear” paths on the design. If the software doesn’t see a clear path, then it will not add a line there. Something to keep in mind is that while we may see a “clear path”, the software looks at the selection boxes around a design and if they overlap, it does not see it as a “clear path.
For this reason, I find that the automatic weeding lines don’t always work for my project.

You can see in the photo above, I chose the Horizontal & Vertical option and it placed a blue weeding line where it saw a “clear path”. This is only around the outer edge and in one place in the design top to bottom.

If I choose the Recursive option, it adds a few more blue weeding lines in there.

Find out more about the Weed Settings Panel HERE.

2 – Option 2 – Draw weeding lines using the Drawing Tools or the Line Tools. This allows you to have more control over where the weeding lines are.

Like I said above, it never fails that I forget about this handy trick until after I’ve already unloaded my cutting mat or material.

This is a great habit to get into when you are working with large decals, with detailed designs, or designs with lots of dots to i’s.

Check out how easily this weeds around the individual words when you are not messing with a large section of sticky adhesive vinyl.

And here is a short video on how I re-positioned the vinyl after applying to account for the fake slates in this board.

Hope this little tip helps you in working with materials and your Silhouette machine!

I would love to see your creations!
Feel free to post photos or questions on my Facebook group at 
Silhouette Secrets with EllyMae.

Save this for future reference by pinning the image below.

Enjoy!

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